Journal Entries for Terezín and Old Jewish Cemetary

While we were in Terezín, the most amazing things I saw were the peices of artwork that came out of such a horrific situation. I copied down several of the drawings that I saw to the best of my ability. There were so many different styles and medias used and most of them had to be done in secret on stolen away materials.

The Rim Rim Rim lettering is from a boys magazine that was published in Terezín. There were dorms for young boys and girls and it looked like every house had their own little magazine. The mushroom is propaganda from a children's book called "Poisonous Mushrooms" intended for aryan children to instill anti-semitism from an early age. To the right of that drawing is a drawing from a photograph of Jewish men from Berlin standing in line at the Palestine and Orient travel agency to apply for emigration. The little circles to the right of that are from the Nuremberg laws which had standards to identify Jews and 1st and 2nd level part Jews called Mischlinge or mixed blood.
This is from our visit to the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague that we visited yesterday morning. The cemetery is so old that there are several different layers of bodies buried there because they ran out of room repeatedly for the bodies. Because of this, tombstones are all cluttered and leaning up against each other and you will see tombstones from several different centuries right next to each other. Each time they made a new layer for more bodies, they would bring in a bunch of dirt and have to most the old tombstones up so you have a huge collection of about 12,000 of them all together.